Yes, that wouldn't have gone over too well either. I wish they had come out with a brand new chip (A6?) that gave the iPhone a speed boost but actually improved battery life rather than reducing it... Or if they had done a better job of power cycling the two cores so it didn't reduce battery life. It's really a shame that standby is reduced because you would think they'd be able to completely shut down one core in that case.

I almost never use the iPhone as a phone, so I don't care about talk times. I do however, really like being able to go all weekend without needing to recharge. I am not playing games on the thing all day, and just want to be able to check my email, surf the web a little and that's about it. So, standby time is important to me.

Exactly. When I saw the iPad 2, I really wanted to get one, even though I had been skeptical of how useful it would be. All the little improvements really added up to a fantastic upgrade compared to the iPad 1. Little things like the way the smart cover automatically puts it to sleep, and acts as a stand. You can tell they really put some heart and soul into the iPad 2 upgrade.
This iPhone 4s upgrade seems like they're running out of ideas and just kind of punted. I'd...

OK, here's an extension of the car metaphor:
"We gave you a more powerful engine, even though the old engine was pretty much good enough, and now you get 1/3 less MPG, even when you're just driving around town. We strapped this new fuel hungry engine into the same body as last year; the one that is twice as likely to explode on impact compared to the body design from two years back."Not in the tech world. In the tech world slow and steady gets your arse handed to you.

Like I said, I'm sure they had their reasons. But, now they have another problem on their hands.If you drop an iPhone 4 you're almost twice as likely to suffer fracturing than dropping an iPhone 3G from the same height. The reason is simple: twice as much glass, twice as much surface area, twice as likely to break. Bad design. They should have ditched it.

There was a build-up of expectations because they took longer this time around. Presumably they had their own good reasons for this, but, as an outside observer, it seemed like they must be working on something really special. There are definitely some great features in iOS 5, but the hardware doesn't seem like a huge step forward. They already deployed the A5, so no big effort there. They didn't develop the camera itself. So, what took so long? Same case, same screen,...

You're right. It's not the same as the old model. It has worse battery life.
I'm still using a first generation iPhone. It lasts all weekend on a charge. I'm not sure any of the newer models would do that for me, and this thing is 4 years old. Every time an update has been announced I've been like 'meh.' I was really hoping this would be the update that would have enough goodies to pry my hands off the old trusty, almost rusty, first gen. No such luck. \

Sure would be nice to be able to post a page to my FB profile directly from Safari or YouTube. It would be nice to be able to upload photos directly from the camera app. That's not asking a lot, really.

Here's what I would have liked to have seen:
Non-glass back
Edge-to-edge screen (either bigger screen,or smaller overall)
Non-exposed antenna
Better battery life
Turn by turn GPS with real time updated traffic
NFC with wallet features
Facebook integration
QR code integration
I don't actually care about the camera or the processor speed, so this phone isn't for me. The iCloud stuff is cool, so maybe I'll get an iPhone 4, or wait until the next one, which probably will...